Quotes By Steve Lacy

If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die.

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.

Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.

Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.

You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity.

When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.

People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.

I've performed solo for 20 years now, but I don't do much of it, because if you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music.

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind.

To me, there is spirit in a reed. It's a living thing, a weed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. It's really an ancient vibration.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.

Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.

It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing.

We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn.

The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.

What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.